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Ioannis M. Konstantakos the Volume Teatro Tragico Greco Ioannis M. Konstantakos National and Kapodistrian University of Athens uoa.academia.edu/IoannisKonstantakos [email protected] AA. VV., Teatro tragico greco: ricostruzioni e interpretazioni, a cura di G. Zanetto. Consulta Universitaria del Greco, Seminari 4, Fabrizio Serra, Pisa-Roma 2020. The volume Teatro tragico greco: ricostruzioni e interpretazioni, edited by Giuseppe Zanetto and magisterially produced by Fabrizio Serra, one of the finest academic presses in Italy, collects the papers of seven Italian classicists of the younger generation. The papers were originally presented in a research seminar organized in the Università La Sapienza at Rome, under the auspices of the Consulta Universitaria del Greco, in December 2019, shortly before the outbreak of the great calamity. All seven papers examine aspects of Greek tragic drama, under specialized philological perspectives. Cutting-edge modern approaches, such as the investigation of the remains of fragmentary tragedies, and highly technical research fields, namely metrical analysis and the study of ancient scholarship, are most prominent. I shall give a brief critical presentation of each one of the seven essays, before turning in the end to a general appreciation of the volume and of its contribution to knowledge. *** The story of Atreus and Thyestes is one of the great lost cycles of Greek drama, apparently as popular on the classical stage as were the capital tragic myths of Oedipus or Medea. The murderous antagonism of the two brothers was treated in a considerable number of plays by Sophocles, Euripides and several minor tragedians. Alice Bonandini focuses on a range of literary and iconographic sources which point towards important aspects of plot and characterization in those lost tragedies about Thyestes. Apulian vase-paintings of episodes of the myth are examined in comparison with testimonia from Aelian, Hyginus, the Palatine Anthology, and ancient scholia. Bonandini aptly opts to consider these disparate materials as a complex network and view them in their correlations and interconnections with one another, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which may combine to reveal portions of the image of a dramatic tradition. It is not possible to connect every one of her findings with a specific tragedy, but all of her results, in their totality, indicate important trends and tendencies in the ancient dramatic treatment of the Thyestes myth — trends which may have been developed by one or more individual poets. Teatro tragico greco The tragic plots concerning Atreus and Thyestes seem to have revolved around three major constellations of events: the conflict of the two brothers for royal power, including the adulterous affair of Aerope with Atreus and the theft of the golden ram; the notorious cannibalistic dinner, in which Atreus offered Thyestes the flesh of his own sons to eat; and Thyestes’ subsequent adventures in exile, comprising his incest with his own daughter Pelopia, the birth of their son Aegisthus, and the murder of Atreus. Through her careful close readings of the pictorial and literary testimonia, Bonandini establishes that, apart from the protagonistic duo of the two brothers, a number of other personages played significant roles in the tragic treatments of the myth. Aerope, the first adulterous woman in a mythical cycle full of unfaithful females, betrays her husband Atreus, and he punishes her by drowning her in the sea. She appeared on stage lamenting with tears for her dire fate. Pelopia incestuously mates with her own father Thyestes in order to produce a son who will take revenge on Atreus. When her newborn boy is taken away to be exposed, Pelopia is emotionally shattered, but she is consoled by Amphithea and Adrastus, the ruling couple of Sicyon, where Thyestes and his daughter have taken refuge. It also seems that Poine, the personified deity of punishment, appeared in one or another of the tragedies, signalling the retribution that falls upon Atreus for his abominable crime. A terrifying figure with snakes on her head, in the tradition of such stage monsters as Aeschylus’ Erinyes or Euripides’ Lyssa, this daemon of judgement would have brought shudders to the audience in the Theatre of Dionysus. *** Next to Thyestes, and among other celebrated tragic figures such as Orestes and Oedipus, Aristotle also cites Telephus as one of the mythical heroes whose destiny offers suitable material for a most successful tragedy, καλλίστη τραγῳδία. Francesco Lupi concentrates on the Sophoclean tragedies regarding Telephus’ adventures, and provides a series of interconnected philological notes, by which he illuminates in an original manner particular problems of textual paradosis and interpretation. A choregic inscription mentions the performance of a Telepheia by Sophocles. This title is traditionally taken to refer to a connected trilogy, made up of the three attested Sophoclean plays which involved Telephus: Aleadae, Telephus, and Mysians. However, the title Telephus is only transmitted once in a gloss in Hesychius’ Lexicon. Lupi thus refurbishes an older hypothesis, that Telephus was simply an alternative appellation for one of the other attested Telephean plays, a phenomenon that often occurs in the Greek tragic corpus (even Euripides’ Bacchae was sometimes cited under the secondary title Pentheus, again from the name of its central tragic figure). Lupi takes a further Ioannis M. Konstantakos step and suggests that there is no need to search for a third Sophoclean tragedy focusing on the Mysian hero: Aleadae and Mysians might form a tragic dilogy destined for the festival of the Lenaia, in which tragic poets competed with two plays each. Although this attractive theory cannot be definitively proved, it usefully reminds us of the fact that some of the attested dramas of Sophocles and Euripides must indeed have been produced at the Lenaia, the second most important dramatic venue of Classical Athens. Sophocles’ Telephus plays may be added to the probable candidates for this festival, together with the extant Ajax. Lupi further investigates two fragments from the Aleadae, the first play of the putative Telephus dilogy. One of them, a high-style poetic description of the doe that nurtured the infant Telephus in the wilderness, is assigned to a choral song after careful analysis of its metre and lyrical language. The other is a long gnomic passage on the advantages of wealth, which enables men to acquire everything desirable in life. Lupi contributes to the textual restoration of a corrupt line, reconstructing with plausibility the logical flow of the speaker’s thoughts. He detects sophistic ideas in the text, which seems to envisage wealth as a particular demonstration of the hallowed antithesis between nomos and physis: love of wealth is physis for humans, while hatred of riches is not natural. We may indeed imagine a disciple of Thrasymachus or Callicles advocating such a thesis; Protagoras would also be welcomed for it in the milieu of his rich patrons, such as Callias, while Prodicus appears to have adopted it as a principle in his personal life. Who might be the speaker of this apologia pro divitiis in the context of Telephus’ story, is left to the readers’ imagination. *** The contribution of Francesca Biondi exemplifies another area of scholarship in which Italian philologists have excelled for long and continue to produce work of prime quality: the investigation of the ancient grammatical and scholiastic tradition, the appreciation of the work of Hellenistic and later grammarians, as recorded in the voluminous corpus of ancient scholia and lexica. Biondi singles out and studies the comments of the grammarian Didymus that are incorporated in the scholia vetera to Sophocles’ Antigone; she includes both the statements expressly attributed to Didymus and a few additional remarks that may be plausibly traced back to the same Alexandrian scholar, because they contain recognizable elements of his method of work and his critical jargon. Through Biondi’s meticulous examination, a series of characteristic features of Didymus’ philological approach are highlighted in the relevant scholia on the Antigone. The chalcenterous Alexandrian grammarian was sensitive to textual problems, which have tantalized critics of Sophocles ever 3 Teatro tragico greco since; he treated defective passages in an analytical way, focusing on the transmitted text per se, without recourse to variant readings or conjectures. Didymus utilized the principle of συνήθεια, the usus scribendi of an author or a genre, in order to explicate the style and language of a text. He seems to have composed a hypomnema on Sophocles’ plays, in which he provided exegetical interpretation of the tragic text, mainly through paraphrase. He also cited propositions from earlier such hypomnemata in his commentary. In his lexicographical work on tragic vocabulary, the Λέξις τραγική, Didymus habitually adduced parallels from the texts of the same author in order to explain individual tragic locutions. All these observations are useful for the reconstruction of the methods and mentality of Alexandrian scholarship. The scholia on Sophocles have attracted considerable attention lately: after my own teacher, George Christodoulou, who edited in a masterful manner the scholia on Ajax in the seventies, another Greek colleague, Georgios Xenis, has curated handy editions of the ancient commentaries on three Sophoclean tragedies (Electra, Trachiniae, and Oedipus at Colonus). Perhaps we could expect now an exemplary edition
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